“a sense of betrayal”

This is an excerpt from an excellent speech given by Bill Moyers on October 16, 2010:

All bets are now off. The great American experiment in creating a different future together has come down to the worship of individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power, with both political parties cravenly subservient to Big Money. The result is an economy that no longer serves ordinary men and woman and their families. This, I believe, accounts for so much of the profound sense of betrayal in the country, for the despair about the future. As Gabriel says in James Weldon Johnson’s epic Green Pastures: “Everything that’s tied down is coming loose.” America as a shared project is shattered, leaving us increasingly isolated in our separate realities.

John Gardner would understand this dark reading of our gross national psychology. The workings of the human psyche were his field of study. But the Marine Corps, remember, was his finishing school, and Semper Fidelis his personal code. So I will close with his own words, as relevant today as ever:

We are treading the edge of a precipice here….There is a disconnection between the people and their leaders. Citizens do not trust their government. And a variety of polls indicate that this mistrust extends to corporations and the media. People do not feel they have must control of their lives, and the sense of impotence grows like a great life-endangering tumor. Civilizations die of disenchantment. If enough people doubt their society, the whole venture falls apart. We must never let anger, fashionable cynicism, or political partisanship blur our vision of this point.